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19-Year-Old Is Charged in Hamster’s Death

By Andy Newman March 9, 2011 5:29 pmMarch 9, 2011 5:29 pm

The trouble began, Theresa Smith said, shortly after she bought a hamster for her 9-year-old son. A few months later, the hamster, Princess Stephanie, was playing in its exercise ball on the floor of their apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, when an older son, who is 25, flew into a rage.

“He kicked it deliberately, the ball flew across the room, the hamster flew out of the ball, and it died,” Ms. Smith said. After he had calmed down, the older son felt terrible, she said.

“He was very remorseful,” Ms. Smith said. “He bought my son three more hamsters.”

This act of contrition, however, only angered Ms. Smith’s daughter Monique, Theresa Smith said. Monique picked up the biggest of the three hamsters, Sweetie, “took it out of the cage, and she slammed it on the floor,” Theresa Smith said. “It died on impact.”

This was on June 7, 2010. Tuesday night at 7, after a nine-month hunt for a suspect they described as evasive and uncooperative, law enforcement agents from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals arrested Monique Smith, 19, along Knickerbocker Avenue in Bushwick.

She was charged with aggravated cruelty to animals — a felony that carries a sentence of up to two years in prison — along with two misdemeanors, torturing animals and endangering the welfare of a child.

No charges have been filed against the 25-year-old son.

A necropsy by the animal society’s doctors indicated that Sweetie, an adult female who weighed just under four ounces, died of blunt force trauma and liver damage.

Animal cruelty laws apply equally to creatures large and small, said Joseph Pentangelo, assistant director of humane law enforcement for the society.

“It may be a fish, it may be a hamster, it may not be the type of a pet that people commonly hold dear,” Mr. Pentangelo said. “But to the people who own them, they are.”

Theresa Smith, 47, who lives with 10 of her 12 children in the third-floor apartment on Putnam Avenue, said that violence ran in her family. “Thirty-two years ago,” she said, “my brother strangled my sister to death.”

She said that after Sweetie’s death, her 25-year-old son gave the other two hamsters to a friend to keep them from harm.

“We have a cat that just had kittens,” she said. “We’re happy with them.”

I mean… putting a girl in prison for two years for killing a hamster sounds extreme. But at the same time, I can’t see that people should be allowed to… do that. Why not fine her or something? And the other dude while they’re at it? Jail time, maybe not.

why stop at hamsters? anyone who has ever killed a cockroach, an ant, or maybe even a spider should go to jail also. of course i’m being sarcastic. it’s sickening that the lives of these people will be ruined because of their acts, while deplorable to most, is not that different from the millions of people who kill ants or spiders in their homes. i say fine them. have them perform community work. two years of jailtime? what kind of bizzaro world are we living in?

Jail time may be somewhat extreme, but anyone who would do that to a hamster, especially one that was another’s dear pet, obviously has mental issues that could turn into something altogether worse in the future. The torturing or inhumane killing of animals is a warning sign of deeper mental disturbance. Better to intervene early.

Mental health professionals know that people who harm, torture or kill pets, especially with the purpose of causing emotional hurt to others, are more likely in the future, sometimes the near future, to harm or kill humans. We discussed exactly this kind of behavior in a few of the graduate courses I took after one of our classmates described a situation where as part of her internship, the mother of her client, a preteen child, threw her daughter’s pet rabbit out of the window of their apartment from a high floor and killed it. Our concern was that the daughter herself might be next.

This kind of violent, murderous rage against pets, is what is called prodromal or something that precedes or leads to violence against people. Often the pet serves as a surrogate to which the offender projects their anger against the real target, the person they really harbor anger against. the pet may also serve as projective target for generalized anger against people or society in general.

This sort of behavior is in some ways similar to the violent attacks that groups of young men or teenagers do against members of minority groups or gays. We have some a number of these violent incidents in the New York area in recent years.

As animals go, hamsters are cute but not much different than rats, but before anybody assumes that I take this lightly, it is a serious matter. This creature was a family pet, and for all the discussion about intelligence or comparisons to other rodents, it is a fact that pets do (and should) get special treatment from their owners.

Something is seriously wrong with this family. Not one person, but several people are punting pets around like chattel. This is symptomatic of a *much* larger problem.

This kind of thing is one of the major reasons I moved out of the US, so my son would not be raised with the possibility of having his life destroyed for a mistake. Two years in prison for killing a hamster in a single moment of anger? 14 year olds being sentenced to six year mandatory minimum sentences in adult court for statutory rape, because of consensual sex with a 12 year old? When will the US gets over its infatuation with punishment to destruction as the solution to every problem? It’s horrifying on so many levels.

The killing of animals, usually small animals, by children and teens is usually a precursor to killing humans.
This may be the best thing for the young woman and might make her life better in the long run.

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